Introduction

More Alaska voters than ever are voting by mail or in early voting this year. This page tracks the numbers as reported by the state.

The data come from the Alaska Division of Elections website It’s a 10-page pdf, so I ran a script using tabula-py to extract the data. Additional summary information is available here.I have republished the data here, where you can download the reports from each day. I had a google sheet that was updating automatically, but that kept breaking. Other caveats: this involves getting reports from all across the state, so there are probably reporting delays.

If you see any errors, contact Ben Matheson. Disclaimer - this may not be fully accurate or up to date. It also may break at any time. This is not official or affiliated with anything…enjoy!

Statewide Early Vote + Mail Ballots Sent, Received, and Rejected

These are the raw numbers for ballots sent to mail voters, ballots receieved, and early votes that were accepted.

Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Received Percent Received Mail Ballots Rejected
119,310 86,066 72.14% 323

Note: these numbers should match what the state has published here.

Overall Early and Mail Vote Compared to 2016

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters and Received by State

Vote By Mail per Alaska House District

Early Voting Totals Per House District.

Early voting started Monday, October 19th. Here are the raw totals of votes in each Alaska House District.

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters, Received by State, and Rejected

District Number District Mail Ballots Received Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Rejected Early Vote in Person
28 South Anchorage 4672 6188 12 1851
24 Anchorage - Oceanview 3458 4611 6 1641
21 West Anchorage 3242 4329 10 1583
14 Eagle River/Chugach State Park 3220 4435 16 511
33 Downtown Juneau/Douglas/Haines/ Skagway 3219 5022 7 2414
26 Anchorage - Huffman 3203 4312 9 1613
22 Anchorage - Sand Lake 3158 4041 7 1318
27 Anchorage - Basher 3063 4111 7 1307
31 Homer/South Kenai 2844 4173 8 33
25 Anchorage - Abbott 2809 3848 11 1447
18 Anchorage - Spenard 2738 3692 20 1462
20 Anchorage - Downtown 2696 3739 5 1548
34 Mendenhall Valley 2690 4075 13 3718
16 Anchorage - College Gate 2587 3399 10 1072
04 Western Fairbanks 2554 3505 6 2103
17 Anchorage - University 2337 3135 4 1170
35 Sitka/Petersburg 2302 3273 7 30
12 Chugiak/Gateway 2205 3032 11 1907
29 North Kenai 2174 3046 9 39
23 Anchorage - Taku 2163 3021 11 1139
10 Rural Mat-Su 2032 2772 9 1703
13 Fort Richardson/North Eagle River 2007 2659 6 384
11 Greater Palmer 2003 2689 14 2895
30 Kenai/Soldotna 1942 2780 9 12
05 Chena Ridge/Airport 1922 2712 6 1642
09 Richardson Hwy/East Mat-Su 1856 2574 9 1382
06 Eielson/Denali/Upper Yukon/Border Region 1832 2408 3 484
08 Big Lake/Point Mackenzie 1631 2236 7 1928
07 Greater Wasilla 1584 2274 7 2789
19 Anchorage - Mountainview 1566 2170 5 659
01 Downtown Fairbanks 1564 2139 6 1235
36 Ketchikan/Wrangell/Metlakatla/Hydaburg 1550 2203 16 5
15 Elmendorf 1549 2209 12 600
32 Kodiak/Cordova/Seldovia 1460 2351 3 27
03 North Pole/Badger 1216 1692 3 1045
02 Fairbanks/Wainwright 1113 1493 4 821
37 Bristol Bay/Aleutians/Upper Kuskokwim 765 1192 8 44
38 Lower Kuskokwim 428 652 0 10
39 Bering Straits/Yukon Delta 335 524 3 382
40 Arctic 333 540 4 18
99 NA 44 54 0 0

Mail Voting Relative to Voter Registration and Voter Turnout per House District

For each Alaska House district, I have the number of registered voters (as of October 3, this report). You can see which districts are seeing more take-up of mail voting relative to their voter base. Additional this compares the 2020 completed mail ballots to the full 2016 election turnout.

This is not really finished yet. Also I just made up the regional labels.

Partisan Explanation on Vote by Mail

This looks at the relationship between relative vote-by-mail activity and voting results from the 2016 presidential election. The y axis is the percentage of mail votes returned relative to the total 2016 turnout. The x axis and color is the margin by which Donald Trump won or lost the district in 2016. The basic trend you see is that the redder the disrict, the less vote-by-mail there is, so far. The key exception is western Alaska (in the lower left), which voted for Clinton but is not seeing much vote-by-mail participation yet.

Voting Method Breakdown by House District

Mail and Online Rejections Per House District

About

The Alaska Division of Elections data is originally is published in a 10-page PDF that I parsed to extract the data. This uses a combination of R and Python. The Python uses Tabula to pull out the data. After that, an R script cleans out extra spaces, gaps, and labels the rows by house district and adds descriptions. I wanted to do everything in R, but I couldn’t get rJava loaded for the Tabulizer, so the tabula-py library ended up being more expedient.

This page is an RMarkdown document that calculates some summary stats, like percent rejected and then displays the data in several ggplot2 plots. The PDF parsing in particular may be brittle and this could definitely break at anytime.